Quoth the Raven
by Madame Rhea Di'Ey
Summary: Six years after the brutal murder of Uchiha Itachi and his wife on their wedding night, the man miraculously comes back from the dead – pulled out of the pit of Purgatory by the Devil himself. He has a single purpose: to avenge the crime committed half a decade ago and save his lover's soul from eternal hell. Things complicate, however, when he saves a girl from rape and death.


**Author's Note: **I hope you will enjoy the madness of this story. Originally a very long one-shot, my irascibility and inability to wait to finish writing it forces me thus to split it into parts and post it as "chapters". Ah well. It's still going to be _good and gory. _Please do not read this story if you expect smut. The M rating is given by the copious amounts of violence rather than any sex. Erotic situations _might _arise, but no lemons, e?

The concept of **Quoth the Raven **was inspired unto me by movies such as **_The Crow_**, copious amounts of really content-heavy music, a crapton of gory goodness horror, and strangely enough, my Literature teacher's love for William Shakespeare and Edgar Allan Poe (the latter whom me and Ms. Andreea share). Although I own none of the aforementioned things, including Itachi or Hinata (they belong to Kishimoto), I DO own this story; and I dedicate it to my unwilling (and as of late, rather absent) beta-man, Michael; and to Bane, because we share a deep love for things such as this and he's my writing's biggest fanman.

And it also goes out to y'all ItaHina shippers. This is my tribute, my wonderfully dark tribute.

* * *

PROLOGUE.  
_"Something is rotten in the state of Denmark."  
– _William Shakespeare, **Hamlet.**

* * *

_**then.**_

The air feels stiff.

It's one of these dangerously quiet nights – save for the rumble of thunder that breaks apart the sky and seems to shake the atmosphere from time to time, no sound is to be heard in the silent darkness. Lightning bolts, strikingly blue (_a blue so bright it nearly looks white_) bathe the gray metropolis in blinding shine every quarter of hour or so; when they do, it's almost as if the sun never set and the moon and stars aren't hidden behind charcoal clouds.

A strange sort of hotness burns through the air, stagnant and sticky, and it's a wonder the raindrops aren't turning to steam the minute they hit the concrete.

No soul dares walk out the streets. This city doesn't have a bad reputation for naught; more people sleep in a grave made on the fly in the outskirts cemetery than they do in narrow beds cramped in the rundown apartments in complexes that litter the slums. Few lucky, filthy, sinning souls get to sleep on beds made from gold and dollar bills in the heart of the town – rare bastards who might've sold their souls to the Devil – but other than that, this shithole's a trainwreck waiting to explode into tiny pieces and set the world on a little bit of fire.

Thieves and criminals, rapists and child molesters, drunk pigs and washed-out whores – these are the types of people that make up the main population of this God-forsaken and forgotten corner of the world. They've lost themselves sometime in the middle of the insanity called life, and when you know nothing but Hell on earth, you resort to drugs and pill-poppin'. That's the way it goes; you take your medicine like the good little bastard you are and keep going under, deeper and deeper, falling free without a safety net into the abyss.

[_and you hope that true hell doesn't burn as hotly, because you're so sick of this shit it's enough for the whole fucking eternity._]

These people fear one another, because only a monster can kill another and the scent of sin, as thick as that of chemical leftovers in the foam that perpetually drifts through the air, is more than enough warning of what your neighbor's been up to. Sure, a few honest people are left here and there; but innocence is rare and a curse to posses.

You anyway end up losing it, one way or the other – corruption runs fast and deep, and everyone carries it in their marrow, hidden in their very bones, traveling into their veins like the serum of a lethal injection.

Thunder rumbles, deep and imposing. The air keeps growing warmer, defying the laws of nature that dictate it should be cold in late October. Lightning follows the cough of the clouds, and there's something morbidly poetic about the scene: a town so wicked and wrecked it looks like a giant rat trap fit for humans, boiling like a pot under pressure at half past midnight, exposed in all its' cracked glory for the world to see under high-voltage natural lamps. Once it dies, the entirety of Diablo City is covered in darkness, save for a few tame lights behind covered windows – mainly in the local police station's bohemian, spartan-chic offices.

The sky buzzes with something that isn't aftershock from the electric discharges nor friction from the compressed, polluted air rubbing against incoming lightning.

It's..._anticipation._

The world itself is on the waiting, but for what?

The tension keeps growing and growing, building up in an angry rhythm, climbing higher and higher. It slashes through the stuffy thickness of the air like an ultrasonic yelp intended for the ears of the dead only; dogs and cats seem to detect it, too, for they wince within their hiding spots and howl, searching the hidden moon to provide them with a semblance of comfort. Fear is a tangible, dreadful thing as it drifts on nonexistent wind throughout the city.

And then, it happens.

Brusquely and without warning, a scream tears through the still night from somewhere at the far end of the city right where the highway that leads out of this stinking pit and towards Chicago begins.

* * *

Rain pours down in a free, waterfall-like fashion, drenching the streets and cooling the asphalt. The scent of dust and dirt that somehow still rises even after many hours of storm is a rich odor in the night, its' texture almost foamy as a whispered, light breeze carries it around and out of the metropolis.

Rain keeps pouring, seemingly adamant on washing away the sins of the wretched hornet nest called Diablo City.

Good thing it does, police chief Sarutobi Asuma can't help but bitterly think.

He's crouched down by the corpse of a young man that lays face up on the dented gray concrete in a pool his own blood mixed in with shards of glass and cloth; eyes a charcoal as deep as the sky they're staring at are glossy, glazed over by the cold caress of Death and doomed to never see the sun again. With a heavy hand and an even heavier heart, the policeman closes those onyx gems while muttering a soft curse.

"Two victims," one of his younger officers announces solemnly, softly. "A man, and a woman."

Asuma twists his head to the side to get a better look at the twenty-year-old's down turned eyes. So they've got the boy's girlfriend, too. Or had they married meanwhile? No, they must have not. He hadn't seen a ring on the man's finger. "Uchiha Itachi and Ayame Nojo," he confirms rather absently with a certain sadness as he forces himself out of useless thoughts. He knows them both since they were children. Ayame is – was – the orphan daughter of a restaurant owner and chef, and Itachi was...well, he was the golden boy of Diablo.

The eldest son of the former police force's chief, Fugaku, he had been brilliant before he even made his first steps on the ground of this earthen hell, albeit he had been a little more than simply socially awkward. Fate decided he isn't worthy of happiness, though, and his mother was assassinated at the orders of a drug lord whilst his father was decapitated for the _fun _of it. All he had had left was his younger brother, Sasuke.

Later, his tragedy united him with the strange girl with doe eyes and it seemed like the heavens decided to smile a little for the trio, too. But now..."Where's the woman?"

"Upstairs. She's..." Shikamaru Nara gestures weakly. Then, he sighs, giving up on trying to put what he wants to say into coherent phrases. "You'll see."

The younger policeman leads Asuma inside the building, away from the corpse of the unfortunate genius-boy. They climb the stairs up to the last floor – the sixth. At apartment 21, the brown-haired male stops and steps aside, making room for his superior to enter first in what would normally count as an act of respect. Knowing Shikamaru, however, he stepped aside simply because he couldn't go in there first.

And Asuma quickly understands why.

He sees her – or what's left of her, anyway –, and wishes he hadn't. Wishes, really, that he had taken the proposed leave and went on a long holiday away from this madness together with his wife and their unborn child. He feels bile rise high in his throat and press against the base of his tongue and he dry heaves as he steps inside the flat seemingly on auto-pilot. Across the hall and room from him, to the right of the broken window out of which her lover had fallen or been pushed out of, lay the remnants of the girl he sees once more at seven years of age through his memories' haze.

Except she isn't anymore a sweet child with pigtails, scraped knees and a toothy grin.

She's a mutilated cadaver belonging to a presumably beautiful woman.

[_it's really hard to tell since she's missing half of her face, but oh well, I digress._]

"This is sick," he whispers, clasping a hand over his mouth. He stares with trembling eyes at the corpse of the badly disfigured woman and feels the need to retch and vomit into a nearby empty plant pot. Burnt flesh, ripped chunks of meat, peeled skin – bruises webbing across most of her body, all purple-black like a plum. Whatever is left of a once-white cotton dress covers little of her body with its' torn fragments. Not nearly enough. "They set her like a fucking bride," he monotonously observes, eyes glued to her head atop which a handkerchief rests as substitute of a veil.. "A mockery of...oh, Heavens."

"They say this was supposed to be their wedding night," Shikamaru tells him, a certain dose of uneasiness in his tone. The boy is clearly uncomfortable with the whole ordeal.

Asuma feels even sicker. He has a gut feeling..."Where's the coroner?"

"On her way, sir."

They wait in silence for the dead people's doctor to arrive, eyes glued to the corpse in a fixed, not-so-sane fashion. The police chief lights cigarette after cigarette, making his throat raw as he mourns silently.

* * *

Senju Tsunade is one of these women that vehemently refuse to show their age; must be nice, Asuma thinks, to be nearing fifty and still look like a total babe – not that he'd know, obviously. He's a man. Men don't care about such shit. He stares at her backside and feels like a goddamned pervert as she leads him down the halls of the cold, sterile morgue and into the storage section where cadavers involved in official investigations are usually kept at cold so as to not rot ahead of time. His own father had been a father for her as much as he had been for the two kids they're going to see now. She opens the door and enters the sinister place first.

Her rock-hard calm unnerves him.

[_the fact that she dissected **family **unnerves him even_ _more._]

But then again, she's been working here for a good twenty years; this mortuary is basically her second home.

She draws open two of the storage shelves and pulls halfway out the two corpses involved in this particular case. Her caramel eyes show a certain tiredness. "The man died from severe hemorrhage. I found most of his bones broken, including his spinal cord. He was also stabbed twice in the abdomen with a knife, and had some severe cuts on his back from when he passed through that window," she lists like she's telling him a muffin recipe. "The woman, on the other hand..." Tsunade continues, pausing to nip at her bottom lip and sigh. "I don't even know where to begin."

"Cause of death?" he suggests, and she folds her hands across her chest.

"Hemorrhage, just like her fiance; except hers was internal. Fiance...or is it husband?" she scrunches up her nose and shrugs. "I digress. Her internal bleeding, however, was far worse than his. If you ask me, he got out of this cheaply. She suffered so much trauma it's a wonder she didn't die from cardiac arrest," the blonde lists softly. "Aside from the obvious wounds, she was also raped. I can't say if it was before or after they mutilated her. Might've been both. I don't know. What I _do_ know is that she was a virgin when it happened," she states, looking straight into the policeman's eyes.

He feels sick to the stomach.

She puts the two bodies back in their refrigerators. "I'm sorry for your loss, Asuma."

"I'm going to find and skin alive whoever did this to them," he mutters miserably. She pulls him into a short, tight embrace. He feels like he's six again on a Christmas Eve, the time of the year when they went visiting the Senju and she used to stretch his cheeks raw.

However, just like Ayame is no longer the toothy child with pigtails, Tsunade isn't that bubbly teenager anymore.

[_at least she is alive._]

She leads him out of the mortuary storage, letting the neon lights on to bathe the steel-enforced space in violet shine. In her office, she sorts through the files on her desk and pulls out these that are regarding corpses number 10666 and 10667. She hands them to him with a perfectly unreadable, professional expression. "These are the copies that go in the police's archives. The original will stay at the morgue's archive, as the procedure dictates. Tell me when the bodies can be released; since neither has a close blood relative, the State is going to take care of the funeral."

"I'm actually going to take care of the burials myself," he tells her with a crooked, miserable smile. "It's the least I can do."

She nods. "Of course. I'll take care of facilitating it."

He buries the two side by side only a week later. It's November, and it's raining.

Figures.

"The investigation has been ordered by the higher-ups to halt," he tells the two freshly dug graves. "I'm so sorry."

* * *

_**s**__**ix years later.**_

The afternoon is cold – the sky, painted over in patches of varying grays, breaks into a light, dizzy downpour. The month of October is never kind on Diablo City; especially around Halloween. The sky seems to deliberately let rain fall so at least someone cries for the dead that flourish in numbers like mushrooms after a storm. Quiet rumbles of thunder slash the silence, instilling a strange sort of serenity over the ghost town of sin.

_Caw._

A single crow floats in free flight over the lonesome graveyard situated on the outskirts of the hornet nest, black feathers falling down from its' wingspan and landing gently on the wet, muddy ground and on the cracked pavement of the narrow alleys that make up the maze of the cemetery. It's a depressingly beautiful sigh to behold: tombs of the rich, as few as these are, stand within ornate crypts guarded by imposing bas reliefs and statues; they mingle with the simple graves of the poor, famine and sickness-stricken commoners, making for a sinister and odd array.

_Caw._

Wild herbs and vine plants crawl all over the place beyond the shabby iron wrung gates, fed by the rich earth and growing freely since no one bothers to clean the almost abandoned space anymore these days. The dead, either rich or poor, that rest in these graves have been all but forgotten by the living ones they've left behind. No one visits the cemetery, not even the caretaker; the gates swing open, groaning and screeching due to having been disturbed, only when a new fallen one's brought in to be lain to rest.

And like a mouth, the graveyard opens and swallows whole the newcomers, only to close until the next unlucky soul comes along.

_Caw!_

The crow finally settles, perching atop the rim of one tombstone precariously. The carvings embedded into the granite list a name and the dates of birth to death; under them, a simple message that's just as cold as it is generic. The black bird buries its' beak into its' own feathered wing, furiously nipping at its' own body as if to scratch an itchy spot. Few coal feathers fall on the grave below the stone, and the bird lifts its' head to stare with seeming disdain at the sky and the rain that pours down from it.

_Caw._

Suddenly, there is a drop in the temperature of the cemetery. The atmosphere shifts, an eerie note making the air seem ancient; it's scented like dust and ash, and seems to press down with a lead-like force. The crow cocks its' head, flapping its' drenched wings to shake out some of the water, and waits patiently, undisturbed by the changes occurring in its' surroundings. A dark, tall figure approaches the tomb, steps silent even if they should clack against the river-stone paving – an enormous, inhumane shadow looms in abnormally dense black behind the eerie stranger.

It is a man.

[_only in appearance, if we are to be honest; under that cold snakeskin hides the soul of a fallen._]

He's sculpted like a statue: pale, pale, _pale _almost ashen skin with the features of a god and long, silky jet black hair that flows like ink around his frame; golden eyes shine like amber exposed to sunlight, completing the perfection of his chiseled features with a note of something that definitely screams inhuman. He's dressed to the nines in an all-black suit without a cravat and wearing a long trench coat over, left to billow in a nonexistent wind behind him as he walks. The crow seems to give him a scorning look, for he smiles apologetically at the bird, one long index finger reaching to scratch it below the beak.

_Caw._

His eyes scan the writing on the tomb, and his lips curve into a smile. "Interesting," he comments, eyes alight with something almost...playful. The crow caws gutturally, almost as if snorting. The man chuckles quietly. "I never doubted it, my dear. I simply wasn't expecting it to have such...poetic potential," he softly praises, caressing the bird.

"The only problem is whether or not Death will allow you to give course to this game," the crow responds, its' voice that of a woman. She seems unfazed.

The smile on the black-haired man's lips turns into a wicked smirk. "Oh, he will," he assures. "He has, for the past centuries. Why would he say no? It's just a harmless little bout of fun."

"It's disrupting the balance," the bird comments. "Even if it doesn't have a major effect, that old sack of bones won't like it anyway."

It's the man's turn to snort. "Please," he says as he rolls his eyes, the barest spark of irritation arising fast and dying just as quickly. "He's getting more and more bored with each passing year; he likes the chaos, even if he doesn't fancy admitting it," he waves off the reasonable argument, turning to look towards the sky. He stays like that, enjoying the sensation of falling rain against his skin, for several minutes. "And even if he says no..." he trails off, eyes closed, voice dropping to a whisper, "I can be pretty persuasive."

_**Caw.**_

Both he and the crow are gone, and a strong gust of bone-chilling wind makes the aged gates of the cemetery rattle.


End file.
